parental responsibility

As I shifted through the weekend, my thoughts were on being a father (grandfather, god parent) and the responsibility that comes with that territory. If things are going well or moving forward for your children then I think we tend to forget that we have any responsibility and we coast through life. I was thinking about what happens when things go wrong. There is/could be a wrenching of the soul as things move beyond our control. I was listening to the mother that lost her son in the explosion in Mexico, and I heard her pain on the radio and felt it in my soul. When our children do not do well, parents, grandparents suffer. The sad fact is that responsibility can weigh heavily on one's soul. The good news is that just as we suffer through the heartaches and failures of our children, we celebrate and embrace the joy's of their successes.

However, we are not the reason for their failures or their success when they are young or older adults. We may claim some responsibility for success and some responsibility for their failures when they are small, but if we believe and teach individual responsibility we have to accept that they take responsibility for the results of their actions.